Formerly "The Blind Chatelaine's Poker Poetics". Performed from Galatea's mountain -- where nature, art, poetry and wine converge with much love -- she now goes through her keychain as if it were a rosary, unlocking doors for you. Because if Rimbaud said "I is Another," the Chatelaine shares, "Moi am all about Toi."

Tuesday, February 08, 2011

AS REGARDS "MODERN EMOTIONAL INTIMACY"

This is definitely a synchronicity vs. a coincidence. Shortly after finishing a review of Nicholas Manning's first full-length poetry collection, NOVALESS (ELEMENTS TOWARDS A METAPHYSICS), I was asked to do a blurb for his forthcoming and second full-length poetry collection: HOMO SENTIMENTALIS: A GUIDE IN VERSE TO MODERN EMOTIONAL INTIMACY. What timing -- Nicholas hadn't known, btw, that I was reviewing his first book (and said review will be in next issue of Galatea Resurrects). Anyhoo, here's the first-draft blurbie of his second book:

In Homo Sentimentalis' epigraph, Milan Kundera notes, "As soon as we want to feel (decide to feel...), feeling is no longer feeling but an imitation of feeling, a show of feeling." How might that be reconciled with the actual poems wherein may be found such effectively moving text as "the moment your hair / ’s height falls * down covering / my lit body in threads / of unthinking / light"? Perhaps that it is as difficult to be artificial as it is to be sincere? Perhaps that intention (e.g. a privileging as Kundera describes the raising of "feelings to a category of value") may not manifest itself when the raw material, words let alone poems, is so subjective (or, to paraphrase one poem, are doppelgangers to their referenced realities)? The genius of Nicholas Manning's Homo Sentimentalis is that one is moved to deliberate on these questions and care about such answer(s) as they surface or not. It is pure poetry -- ungraspable but nonetheless meaningful, just like those asterisked stars interspersed throughout the poems for glimmers of, though they may not actually be, light.

And in addition to having perused Nicholas' manuscript, here's the rest of my latest Recently Relished W(h)ine List:

WINTER HARVEST:(Listing this harvest has a fizzling-out feeling; hence, this shall be my last post about this Winter Garden 2010-2011)500 pounds of olives (but sadly went all to compost due to City Slicker's ignorance of pressing olives for oil within 24 hours of being picked)35 pounds of honey18 persimmons 101 Meyer lemons11 oranges1 head of red lettuce4 heads of green lettuce2 bunches of kale

PUBLICATIONSTHE HISTORY OF VIOLETS, poems by Marosa Di Giorgio (I am ECSTATIC to have found the poems by this Uruguayan poet -- thanks to Ugly Duckling Presse for publishing and Jeannine Marie Pitas for translating -- it's a wonderful collection!)